IBM Systems and Technology Data Sheet IBM XIV Storage System Storage reinvented: Powerful, cloud-agile enterprise storage that is easy to manage and scale As the planet becomes smarter—more instrumented, interconnected Highlights and intelligent—your business faces the dual challenges of managing a staggering amount of information, and extracting the most value from ●● ●●A revolutionary, proven, high-end disk it, to meet the needs of employees, partners and customers. Having the storage system designed for extreme ease of use and operational agility right storage is fundamental to IT enabling growth. ●● ●●Consistent high performance without The IBM® XIV® Storage System is high-end disk storage that supports hotspots, along with massive parallelism, enabled by grid architecture the need for high performance, reliability and flexibility while helping keep costs and complexity to a minimum. Efficient by design and born ●● ●●Virtualized storage for optimized cloud optimized to simplify storage, the XIV Storage System exemplifies and virtual environments IBM Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing, empowering thousands of ●● ●●High reliability and availability via organizations worldwide to take control of their storage and gain business full redundancy, self healing and unprecedented rebuild speed insights from their data. Designed for consistent Tier 1 performance and five-nines availability, XIV storage offers low total cost of ownership ●● ●●Low TCO due to aggregate benefits (TCO) and addresses even the most demanding and diverse workloads. including high-density drives, simplified planning, low-touch management and Never compromising performance for reliability, the XIV grid architec- cost-free features ture delivers massive parallelism—resulting in uniform allocation of sys- tem resources at all times. A recognized leader in storage manageability, XIV storage sets a new standard for ease of use by automating most tasks and providing an extraordinarily intuitive user interface. This interface is accompanied by an equally rich and comprehensive command line interface (CLI) for tailoring the system to user requirements. Exceptionally elastic, XIV storage delivers strengths that are an ideal match for the unique requirements of cloud deployments and effective cloud computing—the system is hotspot-free, eliminates the need for IBM Systems and Technology Data Sheet tuning of any kind, and is particularly adept at handling easily with virtualization, email, database, analytics, data dynamic, heterogeneous workloads. Through IBM Hyper-Scale protection and other solutions from IBM and leading providers technologies, XIV storage enables customers to move volumes such as VMware, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, SAS and Symantec. online between multiple XIV systems and without interruption XIV storage plays a key role in IBM end-to-end dynamic to host applications (IBM Hyper-Scale Mobility) and to manage infrastructure solutions, integrating with IBM ProtecTIER®, and monitor multiple XIV systems with simplicity via a consoli- IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS), dated, integrated display (IBM Hyper-Scale Manager). Volume IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller (SVC), mobility and consolidated management are key customer- the IBM Storwize® family, IBM Tivoli® products and empowering capabilities that support the IBM goal of enabling IBM PureFlex™ System. seamless management of multiple XIV systems.1 Both capabilities drive operational agility and efficiency for large XIV storage features advanced hardware components for out- deployments. standing performance. Its InfiniBand backplane offers massive throughput and low latency, while dozens of powerful CPUs, Dedicated to maximizing ease of management and flexibility, abundant RAM, 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gbps iSCSI IBM empowers IT staff with “anytime, anywhere” XIV storage ports, and an advanced motherboard can address the highest, monitoring through a handy mobile application. Supporting most-demanding application workload needs. Customers iOS and Android operating systems (Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, requiring ultra-high performance have the option of benefitting and leading Android devices), the XIV Mobile Dashboard from management-free XIV solid-state drive (SSD) caching, enables storage administrators to monitor storage performance, available to all system data and based on optimally utilized capacity status and health across XIV systems quickly and easily. commodity SSDs. Operating with advanced algorithms, XIV components help meet requirements for extremely high The XIV Storage System has met with rapid market success performance, such as ever-changing virtualized and cloud envi- in diverse industries worldwide, including financial services, ronments, and complex application scenarios involving business healthcare, telecommunications and IT, energy, and manufac- intelligence, archiving, data warehousing, streaming backup turing. XIV storage supports a wide range of workload needs, and large numbers of mailboxes, as well as demanding from capacity-hungry to ultra-high performance. It integrates ProtecTIER deduplication installations and online transaction processing (OLTP). The XIV system offers seamless scaling from 28 up to Architecture matters 325 terabytes (TB) by simply adding system modules and is Most traditional high-end storage systems have complex and available in configurations of 4 TB, 3 TB or 2 TB hard drives, inflexible architectures that, even with incremental enhancements, or software-based 1 TB per drive raw capacity. For all configu- compromise performance for reliability. An architecture that enables rations, XIV storage performs with autonomic redistribution performance with reliability is a necessity for coping with unpredict- of system data as modules are added. able data growth. XIV storage was developed, and is evolving, in response to customer requirements for an easy-to-manage, flexible, powerful, highly available system that meets all application needs and scales easily over time. 2 IBM Systems and Technology Data Sheet Born optimized for consistent high ●●●SSD caching (optional): The XIV SSD caching implemen- performance tation coupled with the XIV architecture enables XIV storage Driving the unique performance benefits of the XIV Storage to exceed the benefits derived from typical SSD use. Many System is its massively parallel grid architecture, which delivers storage systems exploit SSDs as static tiers for the most criti- hotspot-free, consistent, predictable high performance to all cal data only. XIV storage uses SSDs for caching across all applications at all times—with no need for manual tuning. This volumes for performance benefits to all applications without same high level of service is maintained even during peak load managing tiers. Using commodity SSD drives, the XIV sys- periods, during management or maintenance activities, and tem delivers a huge amount of caching memory to read-cache upon recovery from disk failures. The XIV design provides the most frequently accessed data dynamically and adaptively, performance optimization that enables ultimate use of system boosting application performance by up to 4.5 times for 2 resources, uniform workload distribution across all system database-like workloads. drives and the freedom to use advanced functions without ●●●Distributed bandwidth within modules: Aggressive adversely affecting application performance. pre-fetching is enabled by the large cache-to-disk bandwidth available within each module, together with the extremely Several architectural features contribute to the XIV system’s large aggregate module interconnectivity bandwidth that is unique performance profile: available on the XIV backplane. ●●●Smart scaling: Any increase in capacity—through the addi- ●●●Massive parallelism in a fully distributed architecture: tion of disk modules—is accompanied by a corresponding The XIV Storage System uses a distributed architecture of increase in processing power, cache, SSD caching (optional) interconnected modules, each with its own multi-core CPU, and connectivity to maintain a high performance level as the ample cache, SSD caching (optional) and high-density disk system scales. drives working in parallel to efficiently serve data to client ●●●Load balancing: The system automatically distributes the applications. Every data volume is randomly spread across all application load across all system modules uniformly, putting modules and disks in the system, and the aggregate power of the aggregate power of all modules at the service of all the entire system is continually available to every application. requests concurrently. By doing so, it avoids many of the The XIV system presents this collection of disks as a single, performance and reliability risks that can plague traditional large, elastic data store on the storage network. clustered controller designs. ●●● ●●●Distributed data: The system stores data by breaking it Hotspot-free: Changes to the application or its I/O pattern down into 1 MB chunks (partitions), each mirrored for do not affect system performance; as workloads change and redundancy to another module. The system distributes all evolve, the system always remains hotspot-free. the partitions automatically and uniformly across all the ●●●Configuration change: Each volume is evenly distributed disks by means of a sophisticated pseudo-random distribution across all modules and disk drives within the system. The algorithm. data distribution is adjusted automatically whenever the